Obadiah 1:3

The pride of thine heart hath deceived thee,.... The Edomites were proud of their wealth and riches, which they had by robberies amassed together; and of their military skill and courage, and of

The pride of thine heart hath deceived thee, thou that dwellest in the clefts of the rock, whose habitation is high; that saith in his heart, Who shall bring me down to the ground?

The pride of thy heart: the Edomites were, as most mountaineers are, a rough, hardy, and daring people; necessitated sometimes to extraordinary adventures, and many times succeeded in attempts which others would not venture upon; hence they did swell in pride and confidence, and their hearts were bigger than their achievements, and they proud above measure. Hath deceived thee; magnifying thy strength above what really it is. Thou, people of Edom, that dwellest in the clefts of the rock; houses, fortresses, towns, and cities, built upon inaccessible rocks, which neither could be undermined nor scaled. Or: dwellest in dark deep, and unsearchable caves amidst the rocks. That saith in his heart; who think with themselves, and are upon report of an invasion ready to say, Who shalt bring me down to the ground? it is not possible for armies to approach to us, nor bring their engines to shake or batter our walls. Who shall? i.e. none can.

Obadiah 1:3 The pride of thine heart hath deceived thee, thou that dwellest in the clefts of the rock, whose habitation [is] high; that saith in his heart, Who shall bring me down to the ground?Ver. 3. The pride of thine heart hath deceived thee] So as to make thee think thyself some great business when it’ s no such matter, and that thou canst secure thyself in thy strongholds from thy strongest enemies: but herein thy pride hath befooled thee, and put the same trick upon thee that the serpent did once upon the first woman, Genesis 3:13 (the same word is there used as here), who complained, when she was in the transgression, 1 Timothy 2:14, "The serpent hath deceived me." He is still the king of all the children of pride; and thereby cheateth them, ravisheth them of their right reason, and rendereth them the direct objects of God’ s hatred and heavy displeasure, James 4:6; he setteth himself in battle array against them, αντιτασσεται. "Though his excellency, mount up to the heavens" (saith Zophar concerning the proud person, Job 20:6), "and his head reach unto the clouds; yet he shall perish for ever like his own dung: they which have seen him shall say, Where is he?" There is a deceitfulness in sin, Hebrews 3:13, a lie in all these outward vanities, Jonah 2:8 : they were never true to those that trusted in them. But the proud person "feedeth upon ashes": he feedeth himself with false hopes; "a deceived heart hath turned him aside," put him into a fool’ s paradise, "that he cannot deliver his soul," get out of his golden dreams, "nor say, Is there not a lie in my right hand?" Isaiah 44:20. His case is not unlike that man’ s who, lying fast asleep upon the edge of a steep rock, dreams merrily of much happiness and safety; but upon the sudden starting for joy breaks his neck, and tumbles headlong into the bottom of the sea. Thou that dwellest in the clefts of the rock] In a rocky, mountainous country, as the Highlander in Scotland, out of the reach of my rod, as thou fondly fanciest; in Arabia Petraea, where thine enemies cannot come at thee, and where thou thinkest thyself no less safe and out of harm’ s way than Moses was, when God had put him into the cleft of the rock, and covered him with his hand, Exodus 33:22; or Elias, when he stood in the mouth of the cave, 1 Kings 19:13. Whose habitation is high] Heb. his habitation is high; by a change of the person out of a holy disdain of Edom’ s pride and creature confidence, as if he were extra iactum, out of gunshot, above danger. That saith in his heart, Who shall bring me down?] (Atreus in Thyeste apud Senec.) “ Aequalis astris gradior, et cunctos super Altum superbo vertice attingens polum, Demitto superos, summa votorum attigi, &c.

1-9.—THE DIVINE AGAINST EDOM .(1) The vision of Obadiah.—Properly, vision of Obadiah, without the article. There are three recognised headings to prophetical books—word, burden (i.e., oracle), and vision—and all are used without the article, and in a general way, for the contents of the books, without any intention to distinguish between different kinds or modes of prophecy. Thus Nahum combines burden and vision: “Burden of Nineveh. Book of vision of Nahum the Elkoshite.” Amos speaks of the “words which he saw;” Isaiah (Isaiah 13:1) of the “burden which he did see;’ and Obadiah, after the word vision, instantly proceeds, “Thus saith,” &c. The word vision (Heb., chazτn, from the same verb as “seer”), appears, from 1 Samuel 3:1; 1 Samuel 9:9, to have acquired this general sense at a very early time. It is not necessary from the use of the word to suppose that the future was unfolded to Obadiah “in the form of sights spread out before his mind, . . . a succession of pictures which he may have seen” (Pusey). Vision here = revelation, however supplied. The question of authorship is discussed in the Excursus. Thus saith the Lord God concerning Edom.—After these words we should expect the words of the message, not the statement that a message had come. Among the attempts at explanation, the two most plausible are: (1) The two-fold heading is due to a later hand than Obadiah, who only prefixed the first part, “vision,” &c., to his work; (2) These words are merely a mode of stating generally that the seer of the vision was divinely inspired. The view taken of the authorship and composition must decide between these two. If an earlier oracle is incorporated in the book, it is more natural to conclude that the second part of the double title, which in a slightly different form occurs also in Jeremiah 49:7, was introduced in order to bring the prophecy into closer similarity to the circle of oracles against foreign nations which is contained in Jeremiah. Arise ye . . .—Now at length we have the Divine message. Long ago, in the mysterious oracle of Dumah (Isaiah 21:11), the foreboding of a pending chastisement of Seir found a voice, and now, as in consequence of a signal from heaven, or as if brought by an angel, goes forth the summons to the nations to begin the movement against Edom. The cup of iniquity was full. There is a suggestiveness even in the vagueness of the summons. The nations, without distinction of good or bad, must become the instruments of the Divine chastisement of overweening pride. Edom becomes the type of wickedness that has reached a head, and against which all the sounder elements of the world unite with God. For the full picture, here suggested only in a word, see Isaiah 13:1-17, and comp. Joe 2:11; Jeremiah 51:11. (2-9) Edom’s pride and consequent humiliation. A general statement of the reason of the Divine wrath against Edom. Particular offences will be enumerated presently (Obadiah 1:10-14).

Verse 3. The pride of thine heart] St. Jerome observes that all the southern part of Palestine, from Eleutheropolis to Petra and Aialath, was full of caverns hewn out of the rocks, and that the people had subterranean dwellings similar to ovens. Here they are said to dwell in the clefts of the rock, in reference to the caverns above mentioned. In these they conceived themselves to be safe, and thought that no power brought against them could dislodge them from those fastnesses. Some think that by סלע sela, rock, Petra, the capital of Idumea, is intended.

3. the clefts of the rock] The word rock may here be a proper name, Selah or Petra; the reference would then be to the rock-hewn dwellings of that remarkable city. Perhaps, however, the reference is more general to the “clefts of the rock” which abounded and were used as habitations throughout Edom proper. The expression which occurs here and in Jeremiah 49:16, is only found beside in Son 2:14, where it is used of the hiding-place of a dove. Ewald renders this verse: “Thy heart’s haughtiness deceived thee, who inhabiteth in rock-clefts, his proud dwelling, who saith in his heart, who shall cast me down to the earth?” “The great strength of a position such as Selah’s was shewn during the war of the Independence of Greece, in the case of the monastery of Megaspelion, which was situated, like Selah, on the face of a precipice. Ibrahim Pasha was unable to bring its defenders down by assault from below, or above, and though ungarrisoned it baffled his utmost efforts.” Speaker’s Commentary. For a description of Petra and the approach to it, see note A, below. NOTE AThe following graphic description of Petra from the pen of the late Dean Stanley, is taken by permission of the publishers from his well-known work, Sinai and Palestine:— “You descend from those wide downs and those white cliffs which I have before described as forming the background of the Red City when seen from the west, and before you opens a deep cleft between rocks of red sandstone rising perpendicularly to the height of one, two, or three hundred feet. This is the Sξk, or ‘cleft;’ through this flows—if one may use the expression—the dry torrent, which, rising in the mountains half-an-hour hence, gives the name by which alone Petra is now known amongst the Arabs—Wβdy Mϋsa. ‘For,’—so Sheykh Mohammed tells us—‘as surely as Jebel Hβrϋn (the Mountain of Aaron) is so called from the burial-place of Aaron, is Wβdy Mϋsa (the Valley of Moses) so called from the cleft being made by the rod of Moses when he brought the stream through into the valley beyond.’ It is, indeed, a place worthy of the scene, and one could long to believe it. Follow me, then, down this magnificent gorge—the most magnificent, beyond all doubt, which I have ever beheld. The rocks are almost precipitous, or rather, they would be, if they did not, like their brethren in all this region, overlap, and crumble, and crack, as if they would crash over you. The gorge is about a mile and a half long, and the opening of the cliffs at the top is throughout almost as narrow as the narrowest part of the defile of Pfeffers, which, in dimensions and form, it more resembles than any other of my acquaintance. At its very first entrance you pass under the arch which, though greatly broken, still spans the chasm—meant apparently to indicate the approach to the city.

The pride of thy heart hath deceived thee - Not the strength of its mountain-fastnesses, strong though they were, deceived Edom, but “the pride of his heart.” That strength was but the occasion which

3, 4. It was the pride and arrogance of Edom that caused her to scheme against the people of Jehovah.